Adam Was Exiled to a Land With No Sun and Stood in the River

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The Gate Shuts Behind Him

Adam turned around once and the way back was already closed.

Cherubim at the entrance, and in front of them a sword of fire turning and turning, never settling on one direction. He tried east. The blade was there. He walked along the wall and tried again, and the blade swung around to meet him, and again. It was not guarding one road. It was guarding all of them at the same time.

He was not wandering. He was exiled, and the sword behind him made it permanent. So he went out into the country on the other side.

A Land Where the Sun Never Came

The world had been split in two at the start. One half was made to be lived in, and it was drawn as a circle, and at the center of that circle lay the land God chose, and at the center of that land the city, and at the center of the city the room where the Divine Presence would come down and stay.

The other half was desert. Nothing was going to grow there. It belonged to the Other Side, and much later a whole nation would spend forty years crossing it, losing ground every time it lost its nerve.

Adam came down in a country called Eretz, and Eretz had no sun.

Not night. Night ends. This was a dark that had never had anything to end, a land nobody had lit, and he stood in it unable to tell how much time was going by or which direction anything lay in. Behind him the sword kept turning. It threw the only light he had.

What He Could Not Stop Going Over

Fear first. Then the shaking. Then a heaviness he had no word for, because nothing in the garden had ever needed one.

He went over all of it. The tree. The eating. The voice walking in the evening. He hated every part of it, and he hated the being sent out, but in the dark the thing he kept coming back to was worse than either.

He had brought death in.

Not onto himself only. Onto every person who had not been born yet. Every one of them was going to die, and each one was going to die because of something he did in an afternoon, and there was nobody in that country to argue with about it.

He Walks Into the Gihon

There was a river.

He went down the bank into it and did not stop at his knees or at his waist. He went until the water came up under his chin, and then he stood still.

He was not washing. He was not drowning. He was putting his whole body where it could be seen exactly how sorry he was, and he intended to stay in it until that registered somewhere.

The current went past him. He did not move.

Grief that gets through does not stay down in the dark. Even out of Gehenna (the realm of judgment after death) a light will rise sometimes and cross into the garden, and it never means more than one thing, which is that the weeping underneath has been heard and whoever is doing it is about to be moved.

The Ground He Was Made From

God brought him up out of Eretz.

Not back through the gate. There was no going back through the gate. He was taken instead to a different land with a different name. Adamah, which is the word for soil, which is the word sitting inside his own name. He had been scooped out of it once. Now he was set down on top of it and told to work it.

There, on ordinary dirt, in ordinary light, he was finally at peace.

The other country did not go anywhere. It stayed dark and it kept its name. One generation later God passed sentence on Adam's older son for what he had done to his younger son, and the sentence was to be a restless wanderer in eretz. Cain went out to serve it in the land his father had been let out of.